Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

“You do!”

Exploding: “Twelve!”

“How can it be twelve? Twelve is more than eleven. I’m asking you what’s less than eleven. Eleven take away one-is how much?”

Pause. Reflection. Decision: “One.”

“No! You have eleven and you take away one.”

Illumination: “Oh, take away.”

“Yes. Yes.”

Straight-faced: “We never had take-aways.”

“You did. You had to.”

Steely: “I’m telling you the truth, we don’t have take-aways in James Madison School.”

“Monica, this is subtraction- they have it everywhere in every school, and you have to know it. Oh darling, I don’t care about that hat-I don’t even care about him, that’s over. I care about you and what’s going to happen to you. Because you cannot be a little girl who knows nothing. If you are you’ll get into trouble and your life will be awful. You’re a girl and you’re growing up, and you have to know how to make change of a dollar and what comes before eleven, which is how old you’ll be next year, and you have to know how to sit-please, please don’t sit like that, Monica, please don’t go on buses and sit like that in public even if you insist on doing it here in order to frustrate me. Please. Promise me you won’t.”

Sulky, bewildered: “I don’t understand you.”

“Monica, you’re a developing girl, even if they do dress you up like a kewpie doll on Sundays.”

Righteous indignation: “This is for church.”

“But church is beside the point for you. It’s reading and writing-oh, I swear to you, Monica, every word I say is only because I love you and I don’t want anything awful to happen to you, ever. I do love you- you must know that! What they have told you about me is not so. I am not a crazy woman, I am not a lunatic. You mustn’t be afraid of me, or hate me-I was sick, and now I’m well, and I want to strangle myself every time I think that I gave you up to him, that I thought he could begin to provide you with a mother and a home and everything I wanted you to have. And now you don’t have a mother-you have this person, this woman, this ninny who dresses you up in this ridiculous costume and gives you a Bible to carry around that you can’t even read! And for a father you have that man. Of all the fathers in the world, him!”

Here Monica screamed, so piercingly that I came running from the kitchen where I had been sitting alone over a cup of cold coffee, not even knowing what to think.

In the living room all Lydia had done was to take Monica’s hand in her own; yet the child was screaming as though she were about to be murdered.

“But,” wept Lydia, “I only want to hold you-“

As though my appearance signaled that the real violence was about to begin, Monica began to froth at the mouth, screaming all the while, “Don’t! Don’t! Two and two is four! Don’t beat up on me! It’s four!”

Scenes as awful as this could be played out two and three times over in the course of a single Sunday afternoon-amalgams, they seemed to me, of soap opera (that genre again), Dostoevsky, and the legends of Gentile family life that I used to hear as a child, usually from my immigrant grandmothers, who had never forgotten what life had been like amid the Polish peasantry. As in the struggles of soap opera, the emotional ferocity of the argument exceeded by light-years the substantive issue, which was itself, more often than not, amenable to a little logic, or humor, or a dose of common sense. Yet, as in the scenes of family warfare in Dostoevsky, there was murder in the air on those Sundays, and it could not be laughed or reasoned away: an animosity so deep ran between those two females of the same blood that though they were only having that standard American feud over a child’s schoolwork (the subject not of The Possessed or The Brothers Karamazov but of Henry Aldrich and Andy Hardy) it was not impossible (from another room) to imagine them going about it with firebrand, pistol, hanging rope, and hatchet. Actually, the child’s cunning and her destructive stubbornness were nothing like so distressing to me as Lydia’s persistence. I could easily envision, and understand, Monica’s pulling a gun-bang bang, you’re dead, no more take-aways- but it was imagining Lydia trying to bludgeon the screaming child into a better life that shocked and terrified me.

Ketterer was the one who brought to mind those cautionary tales about Gentile barbarity that, by my late adolescence, I had rejected as irrelevant to the kind of life that I intended to lead. Exciting and gripping as they were to a helpless child-hair-raising tales of “their” alcoholism, “their” violence, “their” imperishable hatred of us, stories of criminal oppressors and innocent victims that could not but hold a powerful negative attraction for any Jewish child, and particularly to one whose very body was that of the underdog-when I came of age and began the work of throwing off the psychology and physique of my invalid childhood, I reacted against these tales with all the intensity my mission required. I did not doubt that they were accurate descriptions of what Jews had suffered; against the background of the concentration camps I hardly would dare to say, even in my teenage righteousness, that these stories were exaggerated. Nonetheless (I informed my family), as I happened to have been born a Jew not in twentieth-century Nuremberg, or nineteenth-century Lemberg, or fifteenth-century Madrid, but in the state of New Jersey in the same year that Franklin Roosevelt took office, et cetera, et cetera. By now that diatribe of second-generation American children is familiar enough. The vehemence with which I advanced my position forced me into some ludicrous positions: when my sister, for instance, married her first husband, a man who was worthless by most anyone’s standards (and certainly repulsive to me at fifteen, with his white shirt cuffs rolled back twice, his white calfskin loafers, his gold pinkie ring, and the way he had with his well-tanned hands of touching everything, his cigarette case, his hair, my sister’s cheek, as though it were silk-the whole effeminate side of hooliganism), I nonetheless berated my parents for opposing Sunny’s choice of a mate on the grounds that if she wished to marry a Catholic that was her right. In the anguish of the moment they missed my point, as I, with my high-minded permissiveness, missed theirs; in the end it was they of course who turned out to be prophetic, and with a vengeance. Only a few years later, at last a free agent myself, I was able to admit that what was so dismal and ridiculous about my sister’s marriages wasn’t her penchant for Italian boys from South Philly, but that both times out she chose precisely the two who confirmed, in nearly every detail, my family’s prejudice against them.

Dim-witted as it may seem in retrospect-as much does, in my case-it was not until Ketterer and Monica came into my life that I began to wonder if I was being any less perverse than my sister; more so, because unlike Sunny, I was at least alert to what I might be up to. Not that I had ever been unaware of all there was in Lydia’s background to lend support to my grandmothers’ observations about Gentile disorder and corruption. As a child, no one of course had mentioned incest to me, but it went without saying that if either of these unworldly immigrants had been alive to hear the whole of Lydia’s horror story, they would not have been so shocked as was I, their college-professor grandson, by the grisliest detail of all. But even without a case of incest in the family, there was more than enough there for a Jewish boy to break himself upon: the unmotherly mother, the un-fatherly father, the loveless bigoted aunts-my grandmothers could not themselves have invented a shiksa with a more ominous and, to their way of thinking, representative dossier than the one their fragile Nathan had chosen. To be sure, Dr. Goebbels or Air Marshal Goering might have a daughter wandering around somewhere in the world, but as a fine example of the species, Lydia would do nicely. I knew this; but then the Lydia I had chosen, unlike Sunny’s elect, detested this inheritance herself. In part what was so stirring about her (to me, to me) was the price she had paid to disown it-it had driven her crazy, this background; and yet she had lived to tell the tale, to write the tale, and to write it for me.